DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- If you were President Obama, why would you bother to give the time of day to an organization dedicated not just to the destruction of his presidency, but to liberalism in general?

It took long enough for him to figure it out, but Obama and
his Administration have finally realized that Fox News Channel is
nothing more than the media arm of the Republican National Committee
and not a bona fide news-gathering organization.

We wonder what the tipping point was for Obama. Was it Fox
News organizing and drumming up support for the "tea party"
protests? Was it the way Fox News gives ample air time to any crank
who opposes Obama? Or was it Fox News' penchant for making up
stories, doctoring quotes and mischaracterizing virtually any
statement that comes out of the President's mouth? Whatever the
reason, the Administration's reaction is long overdue.

Fox News, however, is only a small part of a big problem: the
apparent triumph of feeling and emotion over intellect and reason.

In his recent book, "Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a
Virtue in the Land of the Free," Charles P. Pierce outlines what he
calls "the three Great Premises of Idiot America."

The First Great Premise: "Any theory is valid if it sells
books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units."

The Second Great Premise: "Anything can be true if someone
says it loudly enough."

Finally, the Third Great Premise: "Fact is that which enough
people believe. Truth is determined by how fervently they believe it."

There, in a nutshell, are the guiding rules not just for Fox
News, but for wide swaths of American life.

It is why there is a "debate" over Darwin's theory of
evolution and whether the Earth's climate is changing. It is why some
people still believe Saddam Hussein's Iraq had weapons of mass
destruction and was involved in the plotting of the Sept. 11, 2001,
terror attacks. It is why some people believe that President Obama is
going kill their grandparents and indoctrinate their children.

Fox News and its precursor, conservative talk radio,
definitely meet Pierce's first premise. Both make money by
manipulating the emotions of a small, but noisy, group of people.

As for Pierce's second premise, it is an example of how our
national debate has devolved into argument. "Debate no longer
consists of thesis and antithesis, moving forward to synthesis; it is
now a matter of choosing up sides, finding someone on your team to
sally forth, and then laying the wood to each other," writes Pierce.
"(They have) helped shove the way we talk to each other about even
the most important topics almost entirely into the field of
entertainment."

Television comedian Stephen Colbert has popularized the word
"truthiness," which epitomizes Pierce's third premise. As Colbert
defined it, it is "truth that comes from the gut, not books." Or, as
the American Dialect Society defined it, it is "the quality of
preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than
concepts or facts known to be true."

It has been definitively established that Barack Obama was
born in Hawaii. It has been definitively established that the
government is not setting up "death panels" as part of health care
reform. It has been definitively established that the Earth's
temperature is warming and the planet's climate is changing, perhaps
irrevocably. Yet those who fervently believe the opposite are given
equal footing in the public sphere and their stances rarely are
questioned.

Television in general, and Fox News in particular, can be
blamed for this. "'Fact' is now defined as something believed by so
many people that television notices their belief," write Pierce. "In
the war on expertise that is central to the rise of Idiot America,
television is both the battlefield and the armory."

And, Pierce writes, "if something feels right, it must be
treated with the same respect given something that is actually right.
If something is felt deeply, it must carry the same weight as
something that is true. If there are two sides to every argument -
or, more to the point, if there are people willing to take up two
sides to every argument - they both must be right or, at least,
equally valid."

This is not a blueprint for rational discussion. As we've
seen over the course of the past few months in the debates over
health care, rationality has left the building. That is why the Obama
White House is right to put Fox News on notice.

Fox News has a right to be part of the national debate. It
has the right to inject opinion into its news programs. But when your
news channel actively promotes anti-American ideas and movements and
gives a platform to people who think it's more important for Obama to
fail than for America to succeed, you have forfeited the right to
call your programming "fair and balanced."

Randolph T. Holhut has been a journalist in New England for
nearly 30 years. He edited "The George Seldes Reader" (Barricade
Books). He can be reached at randyholhut@yahoo.com. For extra added
thrills, read his ongoing daily blog on The Harvard Classics.